'I!--No!' He was silent, and I noticed him lean over the boat, and cross himself. 'And what are you doing here?' he asked in his turn. I hesitated. 'Looking for ducks,' I lied, not wishing to frighten him more. 'Ducks!' he repeated, laughing heartily, and his white teeth shone in the darkness like pearls. 'There have never been any ducks here!' 'Never been any? Why?' I asked, as I helped him to draw the boat along the edge of the wood towards the lake, which could be seen in the distance. The fisherman was limping. 'The lakes are different,' he explained, 'and there are as many lakes in our country as stars in the sky, and the stars are only the reflection of them. The lakes are as different as the stars:--there are large and small ones, and some so deep that you can't reach the bottom; or else they are shallow, or marshy. In one there are fine fish, in another small, in some the water's bad, and makes a man ill, because the cattle go into it, in others again it's as pure as air.' We halted on the bank, let down the boat into the water, and entered it, the fisherman in front, I behind. Leaning lightly against one another, back to back, we sailed along like a god with two faces of which one was bearded and European, the other flat, clean-shaven, and Mongolian. The Mongolian face continued its conversation, only interrupting it now and then to give me a warning not to move when the boat rocked too much. 'Everything comes from the water. Even the cow lived in the water until she was taken and tamed by man. There are different kinds of wild beasts and even people living in the water, as there are on land. Now just look!' and he pointed with his oar to the long water-weeds swaying under the passage of the pirogue. 'Isn't that a wood?' It was indeed a wood, dark and mysterious, visited only by fishes and drowned men. Once he had fallen in, no swimmer ever extricated himself from its thickets. 'Old people say,' the Yakut continued, 'that formerly everything was different,--everything was better, because there was more water, and that even the sables used to come up to the farm gates, and there was so much fish that it was enough to shoot an arrow into the lake to draw it back with a good catch. But now there's nothing; the sables have run away, and there isn't much fish. It's only the traders, our fathers, who save us, or we should die. They give the money to pay the taxes, they give tea, tobacco, and cotton. Eh yes! these traders! I'd just like to be a trader!' The little boat struck the bank. We therefore drew it along to the next lake, and continued the rest of our journey in this manner, this being the sole means of travelling in summer in that country of lakes, marshes, and swampy woods. After travelling thus for an hour along a narrow stream, overgrown with bulrushes, we ultimately arrived at the last lake. The sparks from a yurta chimney were glittering on its bank in the distance, like tiny red stars.